Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper--Case Closed (3 page)

My literary agent, Esther Newberg, and I set out on foot for our part of town. I had little to say on the dark sidewalk as we passed the usual suspects out walking their dogs and the endless stream of loud people talking on cell phones. I barely noticed yellow cabs or horns. I began to imagine some thug trying to grab our briefcases or us. I would chase him and dive for his ankles and knock him to the ground. I am five foot five and weigh 120 pounds, and I can run fast, and I’d show him, yes I would. I fantasized about what I would do if some psychopathic piece of garbage came up from behind us in the dark and suddenly . . .

“How’s it going?” Esther asked.

“To tell you the truth . . .” I began, because I rarely told Esther the truth.

It was not my habit to admit to my agent or my publisher, Phyllis Grann, that I was ever frightened or uneasy about what I was doing. The two women were the big shots in my professional existence and had faith in me. If I said I had been investigating Jack the Ripper and knew who he was, they didn’t doubt me for a moment.

“I’m miserable,” I confessed, and I was so dismayed that I felt like crying.

“You are?” Esther’s stop-for-nothing stride hesitated for a moment on Lexington Avenue. “You’re miserable? Really? Why?”

“I hate this book, Esther. I don’t know how the hell . . . All I did was look at his paintings and his life, and one thing led to another. . . .”

She didn’t say a word.

It has always been easier for me to get angry than to show fear or loss, and I was losing my life to Walter Richard Sickert. He was taking it away from me. “I want to write my novels,” I said. “I don’t want to write about him. There’s no joy in this. None.”

“Well, you know,” she said very calmly as she resumed her pace, “you don’t have to do it. I can get you out of it.”

She could have gotten me out of it, but I could never have gotten myself out of it. I knew the identity of a murderer and I couldn’t possibly avert my gaze. “I am suddenly in a position of judgment,” I told Esther. “It doesn’t matter if he’s dead. Every now and then this small voice asks me, what if you’re wrong? I would never forgive myself for saying such a thing about somebody, and then finding out I’m wrong.”

“But you don’t believe you’re wrong. . . .”

“No. Because I’m not,” I said.

It all began innocently enough, like setting out to cross a lovely country lane and suddenly being hit by a cement truck. I was in London in May 2001, promoting the archaeological excavation of Jamestown. My friend Linda Fairstein, bestselling crime novelist and former head of the sex crimes unit for the New York District Attorney’s Office, was in London, too, and asked if I’d like to drop by Scotland Yard for a tour.

“Not right now,” I said, and even as the words left my mouth, I imagined how little my readers would respect me if they knew that sometimes I just don’t feel like touring one more police department, laboratory, morgue, firing range, cemetery, penitentiary, crime scene, law-enforcement agency, or anatomical museum.

When I travel, especially abroad, my key to the city is often an invitation to visit its violent, sad sights. In Buenos Aires, I was given a proud tour of that city’s crime museum, a room of decapitated heads preserved in formalin inside glass boxes. Only the most notorious criminals made it into this gruesome gallery, and they had gotten what was coming to them, I supposed, as they stared back at me with milky eyes. In Salta, in northwestern Argentina, I was shown five-hundred-year-old mummies of Inca children who had been buried alive to please the gods. A few years ago in London, I was given VIP treatment in a plague pit where one could scarcely move in the mud without stepping on human bones.

I worked in the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Richmond, Virginia, for six years, programming computers, compiling statistical analyses, and helping out in the morgue. I scribed for the forensic pathologists, weighed organs, wrote down trajectories and the sizes of wounds, inventoried the prescription drugs of suicide victims who would not take their antidepressants, helped undress fully rigorous people who rigidly resisted our removing their clothes, labeled test tubes, wiped up blood, and saw, touched, smelled, and even tasted death because the stench of it clings to the back of one’s throat.

I don’t forget the faces of or the smallest details about people who are killed. I’ve seen so many. I couldn’t possibly count how many, and I wish I could fill a huge room with them before
it
happened and beg them to lock their doors or install an alarm system—or at least get a dog—or not park there or stay away from drugs. I feel the prick of pain when I envision the dented aerosol can of Brut deodorant in the pocket of the teenage boy showing off and deciding to stand up in the back of a pickup truck. He didn’t notice it was about to drive under a bridge. I still can’t comprehend the randomness of the death of the man struck by lightning after he was handed a metaltipped umbrella as he got off a plane.

My intense curiosity about violence hardened long ago into a suit of clinical armor that is protective but so heavy sometimes I can barely walk after visits with the dead. It seems the dead want my energy and desperately try to suck it out of me as they lie in their own blood on the street or on top of a stainless-steel table. The dead stay dead and I stay drained. Murder is not a mystery, and it is my mission to fight it with my pen.

It would have been a betrayal of what I am and an insult to Scotland Yard and every law enforcer in Christendom for me to be “tired” the day Linda Fairstein said she could arrange a tour.

“That’s very kind of Scotland Yard,” I told her. “I’ve never been there.”

The next morning, I met with Deputy Assistant Commissioner John Grieve, the most respected investigator in Great Britain, and, as it turned out, an expert in Jack the Ripper’s crimes. The fabled Victorian killer interested me mildly. I had never read a Ripper book in my life. I knew nothing about his homicides. I did not know that his victims were prostitutes or how they died. I asked a few questions. Perhaps I could use Scotland Yard in my next Scarpetta novel, I thought. If so, I would need to know factual details about the Ripper cases, and perhaps Scarpetta would have new insights to offer about them.

John Grieve offered to take me on a retrospective tour of the Ripper crime scenes—what was left of them after 113 years. I cancelled a trip to Ireland to spend a rainy, freezing morning with the famous Mr. Grieve and Detective Inspector Howard Gosling, walking about Whitechapel and Spitalfields, to Mitre Square, and to Miller’s Court where Mary Kelly was flayed to the bone by this serial murderer people call the Ripper.

“Has anyone ever tried to use modern forensic science to solve these crimes?” I asked.

“No,” John Grieve said, and he gave me a very short list of very weak suspects. “There’s one other interesting chap you might want to check out, as long as you’re going to look into it. An artist named Walter Sickert. He painted some murder pictures. In one of them in particular, a clothed man is sitting on the edge of a bed with the body of the nude prostitute he just murdered. It’s called
The Camden Town Murder.
I’ve always wondered about him.”

It wasn’t the first time Sickert had been connected with Jack the Ripper’s crimes. Most people have always found the notion laughable.

I began to wonder about Sickert when I was flipping through a book of his art. The first plate I landed on was an 1887 painting of the well-known Victorian performer Ada Lundberg at the Marylebone Music Hall. She is supposed to be singing but looks as if she is screaming as the leering, menacing men look on. I am sure there are artistic explanations for all of Sickert’s works. But what I see when I look at them is morbidity, violence, and a hatred of women. As I continued to follow Sickert and the Ripper, I began to see unsettling parallels. Some of his paintings bear a chilling resemblance to mortuary and scene photographs of Jack the Ripper’s victims.

I noticed murky images of clothed men reflected in mirrors inside gloomy bedrooms where nude women sit on iron bedsteads. I saw impending violence and death. I saw a victim who had no reason to fear the charming, handsome man who had just coaxed her into a place and state of utter vulnerability. I saw a diabolically creative mind, and I saw evil. I began adding layer after layer of circumstantial evidence to the physical evidence discovered by modern forensic science and expert minds.

All along, forensic scientists and I have hoped for DNA. But it would be almost a year and more than a hundred tests later before we would begin to see results—most of them poor—from the 75- to 114-year-old genetic evidence that Walter Sickert and Jack the Ripper may have left when they touched and licked postage stamps and envelope flaps. If it is true (and we can’t be certain) that Sickert and the Ripper left the DNA sequences we found, it was from cells inside their mouths that sloughed off into their saliva and were sealed in adhesive until DNA scientists recovered the genetic markers with tweezers, sterile water, and cotton swabs.

The best result came from a Ripper letter that yielded a single-donor mitochondrial DNA sequence, specific enough to eliminate 99% of the population as the person who licked and touched the adhesive backing of that stamp. All the markers found in the single-donor profile were also present as components of mixtures found in another Ripper letter and two Walter Sickert letters, and other Sickert items, such as coveralls he wore when he painted. (This is neither surprising nor completely damning.) The DNA evidence is the oldest ever tested in a criminal case and is by no means conclusive. We can’t prove the source of any of the DNA because we don’t, at this time, have the mitochondrial DNA profiles of any of the individuals involved—most important, a clean profile of Walter Sickert.

But we aren’t finished with our DNA testing and other types of forensic analyses. These could go on for years as the technology advances at an exponential rate and more evidence is found and examined. DNA testing completed since the initial release of this book not only has turned up more genetic components consistent with Sickert and Ripper letters, but remarkably has revealed a single-donor mitochondrial DNA sequence from a letter written by so-called Ripper suspect Montague John Druitt. The mitochondrial DNA sequence acquired from the stamp and envelope flap swabbed on a letter he wrote from Oxford University in 1876 shares no significant markers in common with the single-donor profile from the Openshaw letter written by Jack the Ripper.

Assuming that it was Druitt’s mitochondrial DNA we recovered from his letter, and that the single-donor mitochondrial DNA recovered from the Openshaw letter was left by the Ripper, it can be argued that Montague Druitt, long considered by some to have been Jack the Ripper, at the very least did not pen this significant Ripper letter (which was also written on stationery that has the same watermark as one of the many types of stationery Sickert used). Since there has never been any evidence to link Druitt to the murders, and since, as I will point out in this book, other murders were committed by the Ripper after Druitt’s suicide in the early winter of 1888, it seems unlikely that the depressed barrister Montague Druitt was Jack the Ripper.

There is far more convincing physical evidence that points to Sickert. Forensic scientists as well as art, paper, and lettering experts, found the following: a Ripper letter written on artists’ paper; numerous watermarks on paper used in Ripper letters that match watermarks on paper used by Walter Sickert; numerous Ripper letters written with a waxy lithographic crayon; Ripper letters with paint or ink applied with a paintbrush. Microscopic and ultraviolet examinations revealed that swabs of “dried blood” on Ripper letters turn out to be a mixture of white wax, oil, and resin—or etching ground—used by fine-art printmakers to prepare copper etching plates for printing. According to forensic paper expert and paper historian Peter Bower, etching ground was usually mixed in art studios. Sickert began his artistic career as an apprentice to James McNeill Whistler, and, Bower says, “Whistler always used the old-fashioned ground composed of white wax, bitumen pitch, and resin.” But, Bower says, it was not unusual for artists to “develop their own slightly different recipes” that were often based on those used by their teacher.

As an interesting aside, a blood-detection test conducted on the bloodlike etching ground smeared and painted on Ripper letters came up as inconclusive—which is unusual. At first I thought that the results could have been caused by a chemical reaction to microscopic particles of copper, since in this type of testing, copper can cause inconclusive results or a false positive. However, an examination with a scanning electron microscope equipped with an energy-dispersive X-ray system proved there was no presence of copper or any other inorganic material in the etching ground recovered from Ripper letters and leaves open the possibility that the inconclusive results indicate the presence of blood.

Art experts say that sketches in Ripper letters are professional and are consistent with Walter Sickert’s art works and technique. Handwriting quirks and the position of the Ripper’s hand when he wrote his taunting, violent letters lurk in other Ripper writings that are disguised. These same quirks and hand positions lurk in Sickert’s erratic handwriting as well.

Paper used in letters the Ripper sent to the Metropolitan Police precisely matches paper used by Sickert for his own letters—even though the handwriting is different. It is evident that Sickert was right-handed, but video footage taken of him when he was in his seventies shows he was quite adept at using his left hand. Lettering expert Sally Bower believes that in some Ripper letters the writing was disguised by a right-handed person writing with his left hand. It is obvious that the actual Ripper wrote far more of the Ripper letters than he has ever been credited with. In fact, I believe he wrote most of them. In fact, Walter Sickert wrote most of them. Even when his skilled artistic hands altered his writing, his arrogance and characteristic language cannot help but assert themselves.